One Hundred Years of Pressure: Hydrostatics from Stevin to Newton

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Notes

1 Gaston Bachelard, La Formation de L’Esprit Scientifique (Paris, 1975), p. 13: ‘Quand on cherche les conditions psychologiques des progrès de la science, on arrive bientôt à cette conviction que c’est en termes d’obstacles qu’il faut poser le problème de la connaissance scientifique’.

2 Cartesian scholars will be aware that Stephen Gaukroger and I have examined Descartes's tactics here, linking them to both the later emergence of his conception of a ‘dynamics of corpuscles’, and the tenor of some of his detailed explanatory strategies in corpuscular-mechanical philosophy. (Stephen Gaukroger and John Schuster, ‘The Hydrostatic Paradox and the Origins of Cartesian Dynamics’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 33 (2002), pp. 535–72.) Chalmers, our colleague in the School of HPS, University of Sydney, takes issue with our interpretation of how Descartes was proceeding in his early ‘hydrostatics manuscript’. Chalmers offers a ‘more charitable’ reading of the young Descartes (pp. 64–65). (We had called Descartes's procedure ‘tendentious’ and ‘ad hoc’ [p. 563].) However, I have also shown that the tactics we termed tendentious occur endemically inside Descartes's later natural philosophy, so that in a sense one might say that a better charitable interpretation is one that makes sense of more of Descartes's scattered natural philosophical texts. (John Schuster, Descartes-Agonistes: Physico-mathematics, Method and Corpuscular-mechanism, 1618–33 (Dordrecht, 2013), pp. 119, 382–84, 499–514.)

3 Alan Shapiro, ‘Light, Pressure and Rectilinear Propagation: Descartes’ Celestial Optics and Newton's Hydrostatics’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 5 (1974), pp. 239–96.